Op Barbarossa

GERMANY AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR:
STALINGRAD AND BEYOND 1942-43
Professor Richard Evans
For Hitler, 1939-45 was in many way s a rerun of 1914-18, except that he was determined of course that it should end in victory rather than defeat. The Nazis aimed both to recreate the spirit of national unity they believed had been summoned up by the declaration of war in August 1914, and avoid the stab-in-the-back by Jewish revolutionaries at home that they thought had been the main cause of the German defeat four years later. In Hitler's paranoid and extremist ideology, not only Stalin but also Churchill and Roosevelt were tools of an international Jewish conspiracy that united plutocrats and communists in a mutual determination to destroy the Third Reich. As soon as Operation Barbarossa was launched, Hitler and Goebbels unleashed a furious and sustained propaganda offensive that linked Churchill's obduracy and Stalin's stubbornness with the increasing quantities of vital supplies being shipped across the Atlantic under Roosevelt's direction. In numerous broadcasts, speeches, wall posters and newspaper articles pumped out by the Propaganda Ministry in the second half of 1941, the refrain was always the same: the Jews were trying to destroy Germany, so they must be destroyed in their turn. Hitler and Goebbels made frequent reference to Hitler's 'prophecy' in the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, when he said that if the Jews started a world war, they and not Germany would be annihilated.
STALINGRAD AND BEYOND 1942-43
Professor Richard Evans
For Hitler, 1939-45 was in many way s a rerun of 1914-18, except that he was determined of course that it should end in victory rather than defeat. The Nazis aimed both to recreate the spirit of national unity they believed had been summoned up by the declaration of war in August 1914, and avoid the stab-in-the-back by Jewish revolutionaries at home that they thought had been the main cause of the German defeat four years later. In...